Dead things.

Valencia fell to the Nationalists in the last days of the war. Advancing from the north and west, the various armies of the fascists pushed through a beaten Republican force. Passing through the ancient city of Saguntum on the 29th of March, on the 30th troops entered Valencia. The British navy stood back as the Nationalists rounded up somewhere between 10 000 and 30 000 soldiers and civilians from the Alicante ports. By the end of the next day the war was over, and the decades of dictatorship had begun.

In 2006 Antony Beevor updated his estimates of the calamity of the time : 38 000 killed by the Red terror, 200 000 in Franco’s response. Estimates for the province of Valencia were around 3000 on each side.

You would learn none of this by visiting Valencia today – there are no memorials to the fallen, no understated monuments to a divisive conflict. But that’s not to say that Valencia isn’t a city at easy with death, that the Valencians don’t understand the inevitable. (Beyond the traditional Municipal Bulldeathring.)

Ghosting its way through the centre of the city is what used to be the river Turia. After a particularly unpleasant flood in the 50s it was exterminated. Banished from the city. It lives now only in the memories of the populace (also in some fields about 10 km south of town). It takes a special kind of “popular will” to remove the river from the middle of a city. A different kind of decision making process to replace it with giant corpses.

The Valencians claim it is a representation of a Lilli-prisoned Gulliver. A genuinely fascinating assertion given the (in) action of the British navy half a century earlier. It is, alas, unmistakeably, a dead swordsman. Possibly executed. Resolutely ex.

An oversize corpse for children to play inside.

Further down the ex-river is a more contemporary satire. A home-grown version. The Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias was to be Valencia’s beating cultural heart. Oddly, a heart is one of the few things the Cuidad doesn’t manage to contain an architectural representation of. They did manage an extracted eye. Two, in fact : one open, one closed. There are also some ribs and an assortment of what might be blood cells.

It is up to the reader to decide which body part this best describes.

The science museum is designed to look like a rotting whale carcass.

One thing they all are – apart from a grotesque representation of a society consuming itself – is empty. A ghost town, hidden inside a skeleton at the bottom of a dead river. The Turia has been dry since the 60s, but the city of arts and sciences is a product of the last decade. The more optimistic half of the last decade.

The Victorians (and also Albert Speer) were inclined to judge past civilisations on the quality of the ruins that they left. Think pyramids, think Haverhill. As such, both the Victorians and the Nazis wanted their buildings to not only look good for the living, but also for the not-yet-living. Famously John Soane went as far as to commission an image of his new Bank of England a millennium hence.